Scion of the Times (w/Alex S. Jones)

In January, 1992, the directors of the New York Times Company agreed, with mixed emotions, to support Arthur Ochs (Punch) Sulzberger's choice of his son, Arthur, Jr., to succeed him as the newspaper's next publisher. Although the elder Sulzberger had made his preference clear three months earlier, the board members had delayed making a decision. They didn't know the younger Sulzberger well, but what they had seen of him was a personality that was markedly different from his father's. Punch Sulzberger was a quiet, self-effacing leader, with an abiding respect for the paper's traditions and with an aversion to conflict; his son was confrontational and brash, a young man who relished his self-image as a child of the sixties. The directors were so uncomfortable with the younger Sulzberger that they got assurances that his appointment as publisher did not mean that he would, in time, automatically inherit his father's two other titles—those of company chairman and chief executive officer. In the end, however, the directors' fears were allayed, and on the morning of January 16th they ratified Arthur's succession as publisher.

In a ceremonial moment in the company's fourteenth-floor boardroom, the two Sulzbergers—father followed by son—walked to a lectern under a portrait of Adolph S. Ochs, the family patriarch. A winter wind howled outside. Just as Punch was introducing Arthur as his successor, one of the sash windows shot open, sending a blast of air into the room and knocking a photograph of the late Shah of Iran off a side table and onto the floor. “The spirit of Adolph Ochs!” one board member said, in mock horror. While several executives struggled to close the window, Arthur quipped nervously, “I hope that's not an evaluation of my fitness to be publisher.”

That issue is no longer in question. In a remarkably short time, Arthur has grown into a serious, self-disciplined executive and has been responsible for bringing more changes to the Times than anyone since his great-grandfather Adolph Ochs, who bought the paper more than a century ago. During the past seven years, Arthur has created several highly effective new sections at the paper, including one called Circuits, which is entirely devoted to cyberspace. He has introduced color photography to the news pages of a paper that had long been known as the Good Gray Lady. He has promoted a boldness—some critics would say a shrillness—of opinion on the paper's editorial and Op-Ed pages. And he has prodded editors into broadening the paper's news coverage to an unprecedented degree in an effort to appeal to a younger, more diverse readership. (He once remarked that if older white males were alienated by his hipper version of the Times then “we're doing something right.”)

Most important, he has radically changed the Times' corporate culture by encouraging the hiring of more minority employees; by promoting more women to executive positions; and by demanding teamwork and open communication in a work atmosphere that was notorious for its backbiting and petty rivalries. He has also demonstrated an ability to make tough decisions. He recently removed his first cousin and best friend Dan Cohen as senior vice-president of advertising, and last week he set aside the feelings of another newspaper family when he replaced Benjamin Taylor, the publisher of the Boston Globe, which the company bought in 1993, with a veteran Times executive, Richard H. Gilman. The Taylors had run the Globe for more than a century.

Two years ago, Arthur succeeded his father a second time, when he became chairman of the New York Times Company—a position giving him final authority over a business his family considers a sacred trust. Now the forty-seven-year-old publisher and chairman is faced with two critical matters. One is the question of who should succeed Joseph Lelyveld as the paper's next executive editor. At the moment, there are two front-runners for the job—Howell Raines, the strong-minded editorial-page editor, and Bill Keller, the managing editor. The other challenge is more daunting: how to make the Times a force on the Internet without sacrificing the integrity that readers have come to expect from the world's most influential newspaper.

Over seven years of research for a biography of the Sulzberger family, we had many interviews with Arthur, as well as with other family members and Times journalists and executives. During our conversations with Arthur, he was both open and defensive, visionary and stubborn, thoughtful and bombastic. It became clear that, despite the advantages of his birth, his life has been marked by difficulty. His early years were spent as a child of divorce, and he has single-mindedly pursued a career in the one arena in which he can never escape the charge that he got where he is because of nepotism. “Arthur is going to go through his whole life with something to prove,” Anna Quindlen, a friend and former Times columnist, told us. “Every day, he wakes up and thinks, How can I show them today that I am the man I want to be?”

Although he can be a voluble extrovert, Arthur is a private man, who is little known outside a close circle of friends and associates. Unlike his father, who has been a trustee of Columbia University and the chairman of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he has refused to join the boards of prominent cultural institutions or philanthropies. On weekends, he pursues his great passion of rock climbing, in the Shawangunk Mountains near his country house in New Paltz, New York.

When we interviewed Arthur one day in November, 1997, he was in an expansive mood. Earlier that morning, he had presided over a meeting of the company's board of directors—his first such meeting as chairman—and he felt that it had gone well. We met him in the publisher's office, which still gave evidence of the youthfulness and informality he had sought to convey when he first became the head of the newspaper. On a sleek, modular desk was a gold-handled sword, a representation of Excalibur, embedded in a rock of clear glass—a present from his sisters, Karen, Cathy, and Cynthia. Across the room was a vintage movie poster advertising John Wayne in “Sands of Iwo Jima.” It seemed an odd choice for someone who disdains the traditional macho stereotype. Arthur still had the lean build, baby face, and curly brown hair that had prompted even his secretary to refer to him as “the kid” when he first became publisher. Having a dandy's penchant for bold-striped shirts and colorful ties, he had distinguished himself from the sober dress style favored by Times executives; on this day, his suit, a gray pinstripe, was set off by suspenders decorated with the Statue of Liberty and exploding fireworks.

When a call came in, Arthur put on a headset and answered with a curt “Sulzberger!” The call was short, and, once we were seated around a green-veined marble coffee table, he flung his leg over the arm of his chair as if he were at home watching television.

We began by asking how he thought he had changed during his five-year journey from publisher to chairman. “The 'm' word,” he said—”maturity.” He wasn't reluctant to mention some of the stumbles he had made on his way up. “I take my shots and that's O.K.,” he said, with a shrug. “I've learned that it hurts and then you move on. I cared about whether people thought I was lazy, dumb, ugly, mean—I mean, some real, basic things that everybody cares about. When you walk into a company that your father owns, you're always going to care about whether you're perceived as being a lightweight.”

He took off his watch and showed us an inscription on the back: “Live long and prosper,” the famous greeting by “Star Trek” 's Mr. Spock. “My favorite episode of 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' is the one in which the captain gets a chance to relive his youth,” he told us. “He vows to not make the mistakes of exuberance that he made then. So the greatest mistake in his life never takes place, because he doesn't allow it to take place. And when he's whisked back [to the present], he's an underling. An underling! It's an amazing story, because what he learns is that those mistakes were what helped define him—the things that pushed him a little bit, that got people saying, 'This is somebody you've got to start watching.' I'm not saying this is my story. I was born to all this. But the fact is that if you start second-guessing your youth and the way you've behaved . . . ” He paused, apparently not wanting to make too much of the analogy. Then he went on, “Have I changed? Of course. My position has changed. My job has changed. My sense of self has changed. All I really mean to suggest is that I knew what I wanted, and I knew what it would take to get here. As long as I had the ability, I mean. When you really love something, you can get away with a lot more than if you seem to be just going through the paces. This is what I was born to do. I don't mean 'born born' to do—I mean I'm good at this! I may not succeed at this, but I'm good at it.”

When Adolph Ochs, the son of poor German-Jewish immigrants, bought the Times, in 1896, he made a place in the business for every brother-in-law and son-in-law, every nephew and distant cousin who wanted to work there. More than a century later, this sense of the Times as a family enterprise persists, despite its expansion into a publicly traded $2.9-billion company that includes, besides the Globe, twenty-one regional newspapers, eight network-affiliated television stations, and two New York radio stations. In the company's two-tiered system of stock ownership, the family controls the board of directors and makes up a significant proportion of its membership (currently, four members out of fourteen). Even the Sulzbergers who are distant from journalism—one of Arthur's cousins is a scientist working at the National Zoo, another rebuilds car engines at a shop of his own in Maine—feel almost umbilically connected to the Times. “We” had a good piece in the Sunday paper, they will say, or “we” ran a good story.

This proprietary feeling runs as deep in Arthur, in his three sisters, and in their nine cousins, who make up the family's fourth generation of owners, as it runs in Punch Sulzberger and in his three sisters, Marian, Ruth, and Judith. “The family,” as its members refer to themselves, sets policy on everything from matters of donations to charities to procedures for training the fifth generation to participate in the company. The Sulzbergers are a resolutely private and modest bunch. To say that one has a “big head” is a stinging rebuke. Ostentatious displays of wealth are frowned upon. A family newsletter called “The Lookout,” which is produced by a cousin of Arthur's, includes the poetry and the drawings of aunts, uncles, and grandchildren, and also a monthly reminder of birthdays and anniversaries.

Arthur's immediate family was not the easiest one to grow up in. “When I view my childhood, I see things as very misty,” he told us. “I can't explain why that is. I don't think of myself as a serious child. I'd like to think I was fun-loving. . . . But I confess that through most of my childhood I was in a fog.”

When Arthur was born, in 1951, Punch was a twenty-five-year-old reservist in the Marines who was just beginning two years of active duty in Korea and in Washington. In 1953, he took his young wife, Barbara, and their two children—a daughter, Karen, had recently been born—to Wisconsin, where, through family connections, he had got a job as a cub reporter at the Milwaukee Journal. After a year's apprenticeship in the Midwest, Punch was sent to the Times' Paris bureau as a correspondent-in-training. Exhausted by the moves and the care of two toddlers, Barbara was hospitalized for depression. After her recovery, she began an affair with Don Cook, a reporter for the Herald Tribune, in Paris. One day, Punch came home from an assignment earlier than expected and found his wife with Cook. The affair effectively ended the marriage, and when Punch and Barbara returned to New York, in 1955, he moved in with his parents, and Barbara settled herself and the children in temporary quarters in Port Chester, New York. Years later, in a rare moment of personal candor, Punch admitted to a Times executive that one of the hardest days of his life had been when he was saying goodbye to his children after a visit and Arthur had cried out, “Please don't go, Daddy!” In December, 1956, a month after his divorce from Barbara, Punch married Carol Fox Fuhrman, a divorcée with a seven-year-old daughter.

Arthur was an unprepossessing child—small for his age, afflicted with allergies, and lacking in self-confidence. Until the age of fourteen, he lived in his mother's relatively modest fourth-floor apartment, on East Seventy-fourth Street. Every other weekend, he and Karen visited their father's spacious apartment at 1010 Fifth Avenue, where they slept on a pullout sofa bed. In the summer, they decamped to Hillandale, the Sulzberger family compound, in Stamford, Connecticut. Punch, who had suffered from a distant father himself, was not given to displays of physical affection. His ways of connecting with his son were to take him to movies and Chinese restaurants, and to teach him how to make tiled ashtrays and clay bowls in a pottery workshop he had installed in a converted maid's room.

When Arthur was seven, his mother married David Christy, a New York businessman. “David was a very hands-on father,” Arthur recalls. “He'd be out there teaching you how to ride a bike, and later on how to drive a stick-shift Volkswagen, bumping along country roads. He played a very important role in my life.” At their mother's request, Arthur and Karen called their stepfather “Dad.”

Still, the differences between life in the Christy apartment and weekends with Punch and Carol were pronounced. For years, on the rare occasions when Arthur and Karen were taken out to dinner at a neighborhood restaurant, their mother and stepfather insisted that they share an entrée. Recalling vacations with her father, Karen says, “It was wonderful. You could go to the hotel dining room and order off the menu.”

Arthur was determined to get closer to his father. To begin ninth grade, he went off to Punch's old boarding school, Loomis, in Windsor, Connecticut. Punch had been so unhappy there that he joined the Marines rather than repeat his sophomore year. Arthur quickly realized that he, too, had made a mistake. “My overriding memory of Loomis,” he told us, “is of sitting in my room with my feet up on the radiator in the middle of winter, with snow on the ground, and trying to stay warm on a Sunday afternoon, and saying, 'I could be in New York. What am I doing here?' ” In March of his freshman year, he left Loomis.

When he returned to New York, he made the bold decision to move out of his mother's apartment and to live with his father and stepmother, hoping, he said, to get beyond “the every-other-weekend-divorced-child syndrome.” He was also seeking a closer connection with the extended Sulzberger clan. “I had another family here that I had really never gotten to know in any serious way,” he recalled.

Punch told us that he was “just absolutely delighted” that his son wanted to join the household, and, at the time, he didn't question whether the move had any larger meaning. “Maybe Arthur thought the grass was greener on our side of the fence, or maybe he wasn't getting along that well with his mother or stepfather,” he said. Still, the elder Sulzberger remained an aloof figure to his son. On week nights, he was often out at business functions rather than at home for dinner, and on weekends he preferred to putter in the garden rather than shoot baskets in the driveway with his son.

From an early age, Arthur had declared that it was his intention to become a newspaperman. The summer after he moved in with his father, he went off to camp carrying Punch's battered typewriter case, which was identified as the property of “A. O. Sulzberger, the New York Times.” Many years later, his stepmother, Carol, said, “If I had to name one moment when the bells rang, that would have been it.” Dan Cohen, the Sulzberger cousin who was closest in age and interests to Arthur, had an even stronger impression of his friend's ambitions. “He wanted to be the publisher of the New York Times for as long as I can remember,” Cohen recalled. “There was nothing else in Arthur's life that he wanted to do.”

After leaving Loomis, Arthur repeated the ninth grade at the Browning School, on East Sixty-second Street. There he joined the debating club and became known for his acerbity. “I was four feet two inches forever,” he recalled. “I think that probably did for me what it does for many short people, which is to make you rely a little more on your own wit. You get out of situations by using humor.” If debating taught him how to exploit others' weaknesses, it also gave him, he said, “an eye for my own vulnerabilities.” He added, “You don't want people to get too close.”

In the summer of 1968, he worked as a clerk for the paper's metropolitan desk, but the experience did not bring him appreciably closer to his father. The following summer, a family friend, Griswold Smith, proposed that he sign up for Outward Bound, in the belief that he needed greater adult male attention, and a physical challenge as well. Arthur was skeptical. “I didn't embrace this,” he recalled. “I had to be convinced that it wasn't the Marine Corps.”

The experience marked a significant turning point. For twenty-six days in the Carolina mountains, Arthur and ten other boys slept in canvas bunks, cooked their meals over an open fire, and tramped into the woods for five- to seven-day expeditions. “They try to build that platoonlike sense of working together and caring about each other under conditions of stress,” Arthur recalled. “You're exhausted, you're wet, you're cold, but you're with people who are just like you.” His worst moment came during the “solo,” when he was dropped off alone in the wilderness for three days with only half a day's rations and with some paper and a pencil for writing. “I hated it,” he said. “I'd never been alone like that before, three days all by myself. I put up my little tarp, put my sleeping bag out, sat there and cried.” Later, he described those weeks in the Carolina mountains as a time that lifted the “fog” of his childhood. He spray-painted his mountain boots silver and, in gratitude, sent them to Griswold Smith.

Arthur entered Tufts University in 1970, and there he concentrated on two subjects that he hoped might serve him well as a journalist—political science and international relations. As a child, he had required tutoring to cope with mild dyslexia—a disorder that afflicts several other members of the Sulzberger family—and in college he earned Bs and Cs.

Today, Arthur looks back on the early seventies as “a great time to go to college,” mostly, it seems, for what was happening outside the classroom. “I was searching and pushing the limits,” he said. He read the canonically hip literature (Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Brautigan), listened to the requisite music (the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead), and experimented with marijuana and hallucinogens.

He had been something of a political activist in high school—he had been suspended briefly from Browning for trying to organize a shutdown of the school following the National Guard's shooting of students at Kent State—and at Tufts he eagerly embraced the antiwar movement. His first arrest for civil disobedience took place outside the Raytheon Company, a defense and space contractor: there, dressed in an old Marine jacket of Punch's, he joined other demonstrators who were blocking the entrance to the company's gates. He was soon arrested again, in an antiwar sit-in at the J.F.K. Federal Building in Boston.

Punch had showed little reaction after the first arrest, but when he got word of the second one he flew to Boston. Over dinner, he asked his son why he was involved in the protests and what kind of behavior the family might expect from him in the future. Arthur assured his father that he was not planning on a career of getting himself arrested. After dinner, as the two men walked in the Boston Common, Punch asked what his son later characterized as “the dumbest question I've ever heard in my life”: “If a young American soldier comes upon a young North Vietnamese soldier, which one do you want to see get shot?” Arthur answered, “I would want to see the American get shot. It's the other guy's country; we shouldn't be there.” To the elder Sulzberger, this bordered on traitor's talk. “How can you say that?” he yelled. Years later, Arthur said of the incident, “It's the closest he's ever come to hitting me.”

In 1973, Arthur spent the Thanksgiving holidays in Topeka, Kansas, where his mother was living with her third husband. There he reintroduced himself to Gail Gregg, a slim, dark-haired daughter of neighbors, whom he had met on an earlier trip home, and who was also looking forward to a career in journalism. When Arthur got back to Tufts, he sent Gail an airplane ticket to come visit him. She landed in Boston on January 3, 1974, moved in with him, and never used the return portion of her ticket.

After graduating from Tufts, in 1974, Arthur began his journalistic training in North Carolina, as a general-assignment reporter on the Raleigh Times. North Carolina was considered a breeding ground for good journalists, and Punch knew the Daniels family, who owned the city's two newspapers. Gail, meanwhile, had enrolled in the graduate school of journalism at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Arthur was “absolutely, totally green,” Mike Yopp, who was then the managing editor, recalled. “Can you imagine anyone who can't spell 'hate'?” Harold Muddiman, the city editor, laughed as he handed Yopp a page of Arthur's copy in which “hait” appeared twice. Like the paper's other cub reporters, Arthur made a hundred and fifty dollars a week. He rode to the office on a Kawasaki 900 motorcycle. Only his Porsche indicated that he had access to a grander style of life than that of his friends.

Arthur and Gail were married in Topeka, in May, 1975. The couple discouraged conventional gifts like china and silver, and instead of attending a traditional rehearsal dinner the guests gathered on the Greggs' lawn for a drunken game of volleyball. At the wedding, it was the groom, not the bride, who wore white: white pants, a white belt, and a white tuxedo shirt, open at the neck. Gail appeared in a sleeveless jade dress.

In 1976, Punch arranged reporting jobs in London for his son and daughter-in-law—Arthur with the Associated Press, Gail with United Press International. Arthur got around on a Triumph Tiger motorcycle, complete with a sidecar, and he often visited the Times' London bureau dressed in black leather and smoking a pipe. “I don't think any of us viewed him as the heir to Punch,” Marian Underhill, the office manager, recalled. “He was quite confident, but he looked like such a kid.”

Punch's performance as a foreign correspondent had been little more than desultory, but Arthur, during his two years overseas, proved himself to be a genuine reporter. In June, 1977, he covered an attack on gunmen who had hijacked a train and taken hostages in Assen, Holland. Because he was the only correspondent in the inner security perimeter, his eyewitness account of Dutch commandos storming the train was quoted in a front-page story in the Times. When he came home in the fall of 1978, he felt “secure” about his reporting skills, he told us. “It was time for me to join the Times.”

Arthur started out as a general-assignment reporter in the paper's Washington office, and there Punch, in his understated way, encouraged the bureau chief, Bill Kovach, to look out for his son. Soon Arthur was asking Kovach to explain how and why he had instituted certain policies. “Kovach was just a wonderful boss,” Arthur recalled. “He really focussed on developing people.” In Arthur's own mind—if not in anyone else's quite yet—he was no longer the journeyman reporter he had been in Raleigh and in London but was now an executive trainee.

Jokes about him had preceded his arrival in the Washington bureau; reporters took to calling him “young Arthur” and “Pinch”—the latter a name he despised. “A man deserves his own nickname, and 'Pinch' is clearly my father's name, twisted,” he said. Soon, however, he was at the center of a small clique of up-and-coming young Times reporters. Chief among them was an economics reporter named Steven Rattner. Along with five or six other reporters in the bureau, Arthur and Rattner formed a kind of brat pack. Kovach warned his protégé that he was making a mistake in consorting with such an exclusive group, but Arthur refused to distance himself from his friends. Later, after he became deputy publisher, Arthur took Kovach's advice to heart and made it a point not to fraternize with his old friends on the paper.

In the spring of 1981, Arthur, Gail, and their infant son, Arthur Gregg, moved to New York; once again, he found himself on general assignment. His ambition had been to arrive as an assistant metropolitan editor, but the paper's national editor, Dave Jones, persuaded him that so senior a title would undermine his credibility in the newsroom. “How many times do I have to pay my dues?” Arthur complained. “One more time,” Jones assured him.

The following January, Arthur was in fact made an assistant metropolitan editor—his first real management position. He adopted the habit of walking around the newsroom without his shoes on, and he joined in the pervasive gossip about who was up or who was down at the Times. “I always felt that he was walking this very careful line and walking it well,” Anna Quindlen, who was then a metro reporter, recalled. “On one side, being part of the newsroom, and, on the other, being inappropriate about an institution with which he had a radically different relationship from what any of us ever could or would have. I used to look at him sometimes and think, How do you do this?”

In the newsroom, Arthur came into direct contact with Abe Rosenthal, the temperamental executive editor. Although Arthur respected the high standards that Rosenthal had set for the paper, he deplored the capriciousness and fear that had, increasingly, come to characterize Rosenthal's management. Rosenthal's stated aim was to keep the Times “straight,” by which he meant free of causes, special pleadings, and political agendas. However, for gay members of the news staff, “straight” had taken on a double-edged meaning. By the time Arthur arrived in the newsroom, the executive editor's emotional outbursts and squeamishness about gay culture had created an atmosphere of cowed silence among homosexual reporters. To protect their careers, they remained resolutely in the closet. Arthur decided to send a signal that this was one aspect of the Rosenthal regime which he didn't support.

In a single week, he took each of the handful of reporters on the metropolitan desk whom he knew to be gay out to lunch, one at a time. “So,” he began the conversation, “what's it like to be gay at the New York Times?” After his guest had recovered his composure, Arthur went on to say that he considered it “crazy” for people to work together so closely and “not have this behind us.” Denying one's sexual orientation, he added, is a “silly way to live our lives.” As news of Arthur's “outing” made its way through the newsroom, the reaction among gays was one of relief. “They were grateful, and a little bit surprised, that I didn't give a shit about their sexuality,” Arthur recalled. “That was probably the only time that I overstepped what might be considered a traditional boundary, but these were friends and colleagues.” Soon he heard that his behavior was viewed not merely as a thoughtful act but also as a sign of how things might change when he became the publisher.

The pivotal moment in his rise came in the fall of 1982, when he left the newsroom and moved to the business side of the paper. “I knew that it was the right step to take, but I also knew that if I hated it I could always go back to being a reporter,” he told us. This option was theoretical, at best. He was determined to be the publisher, and he knew that in order to get there he had to learn the mysteries of what his father sometimes quaintly refers to as “the counting house.”

Arthur started out in the advertising department. He felt the typical newsman's discomfort with ad salesmen, and would have preferred to begin elsewhere, but Walter Mattson, the company's first president who was not also a family member, and whom Punch had asked to help oversee the training of the next generation of Sulzbergers, decreed otherwise. Mattson took pride in his working-class roots, and was bluntly contemptuous of nepotism. “Walter has a keen appreciation of the strength and stability that family ownership brings to the company,” Michael Golden, a cousin of Arthur's, who became the vice-chairman in 1997, said. “But the notion that one of us gets moved ahead because we're a family member drives him crazy.”

In 1985, Mattson pushed Arthur to attend the Program for Management Development at Harvard Business School. Arthur loathed it. (“I wouldn't want to work for the company [Harvard] wanted me to run,” he later explained. “The school was interested in building wealth. I was interested in building value.”) And he protested when Mattson detailed him to the production department, working days part of the week and nights the rest—a schedule that, he said, left him feeling like “a zombie.” The job was equivalent to that of a factory manager. “If a fire breaks out, you're responsible,” Arthur explained. “If there's a leak in the fourteenth-floor men's room, as there was one night, you're responsible. You're just everything.” About a month after Arthur began working with the pressmen, Mattson asked him how it was going. “I've learned a lot,” Arthur replied dryly. “I never knew you could use 'fuck' as an adjective, a verb, and a noun, all in the same sentence.”

Among the handful of other fourth-generation Sulzbergers at the company, there were complaints that Punch's careful grooming of his son to become the next publisher was unfair. Michael Golden, who had his own ambitions for a top job, said that when he joined the company, in 1984, he was informed that there was no place for him at Times headquarters. Even though he had earned a journalism degree and an M.B.A., he would have to start in the magazine group. “They were just delighted to have me here,” he recalled sarcastically.

Punch prompted further grumbling when he named his son assistant publisher, in 1987, and, a year later, when he made him deputy publisher—a position that gave Arthur the final word on business and editorial decisions whenever Punch was ill or out of town. For the first time, Arthur felt that the job of publisher was, as he put it, “mine to lose.” Mattson called him “Deputy Dawg.”

For years, Arthur had consciously kept his distance from his father, because he was fearful that people would try to influence the publisher through him. But now he reported directly to Punch, and the two men began talking with a new ease. Both of them shared a love of punctuality and order. One of Punch's sisters, Ruth Holmberg, liked to joke that her brother's idea of a good time was cleaning out her car. Every morning at six o'clock, Arthur worked out in a West Side gym with Steve Rattner. Then, by seven, Arthur was showered and dressed, and by sevenfifteen he was at his desk eating a toasted corn muffin.

There the stylistic similarities between father and son ended. Punch embodied the Times' traditional image of itself: calm, low-keyed, deceptively strong. He played at being naïve and slightly absent-minded, to give the impression that he needed people's help to get the job done. By contrast, Arthur dominated discussions to the point of arrogance. Max Frankel, who had succeeded Rosenthal as the executive editor in 1986, sometimes had to hold his tongue when the new deputy publisher made impetuous demands and remarks. “I'll say this about Arthur,” Frankel joked privately, “he'll never make the same mistake three times.”

On September 13, 1987, the Times published a thousand-six-hundred-and-twelve-page, twelve-pound Sunday paper, the largest edition in its history. Barely a month later, the Dow Jones industrial average dropped five hundred and eight points in a single day, setting off a recession that eventually cost the Times forty per cent of its annual advertising volume and sent the company's earnings into a free fall. It was in this atmosphere of crisis that Arthur made a close colleague of Lance Primis, the paper's general manager and resourceful advertising whiz.

Primis, who was the son of first-generation Russian and East European immigrants, had grown up in middle-class neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Long Island, and had attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison on a baseball scholarship. After graduation, he had joined the Scott Paper Company, for which he sold toilet tissue to grocery stores throughout southern New York State and New Jersey. He started at the Times by taking orders for classifieds over the phone, and he was so awestruck by the institution that for a while he preserved in a scrapbook every ad he sold. “I couldn't believe that some toilet-tissue salesman was roaming these halls,” he recalled. Persuading people to buy advertising proved to be Primis's singular talent. “He was always a salesman,” Arthur said of him. “He was always on.” In 1980, at the age of thirty-three, Primis was named the paper's advertising director. By 1991, he had become the president and general manager of the Times, and he was on the brink of taking over Walter Mattson's job as president of the Times Company.

Arthur and Primis often talked about the changes they would make when it became their turn to lead. Primis introduced Arthur to the management theories of Dr. W. Edwards Deming, an American business philosopher and a proponent of “total quality management,” who emphasized the value of teamwork rather than competition. “I think Arthur not only deferred to Lance but he adored him and felt very comfortable with him almost immediately,” a Times executive said of their relationship in those days.

The two men became rivals after Arthur was made publisher, in 1992, and Primis replaced Mattson as company president, eight months later. Punch Sulzberger had long relied on the strength and steadiness of Mattson's leadership and had repeatedly tried to talk him out of taking early retirement. Punch was further discomfited by the fact that Mattson had made it nearly impossible to name as his successor anyone but Primis, a man whom Punch did not know well and who had not, he felt, been adequately trained for the presidency.

Arthur's activist approach was immediately felt on the editorial page, where he installed one of the paper's most combative journalists, Howell Raines, as the editor. Virtually overnight, the tone of the page sharpened. Bill Clinton complained to Arthur about the page's relentless criticism of the new Administration, whereupon Arthur replied that he liked to think of the Times' editorials as “tough love.” Clinton said wearily, “Well, just don't forget the love part.”

On the news pages, Arthur's most visible first move was the introduction of Styles of the Times—a new section, in the Sunday edition, designed to attract advertising from trendy downtown boutiques and to lure members of the MTV generation to the paper. Time magazine described Arthur unveiling the prototype and joking that “young readers had better like it because all the older ones would drop dead when they saw it.” He was not wrong. Styles included coverage of gay rodeos, a clothing store that specialized in lace-up “bondage trousers,” and the various joys of Billy Idol and cyberpunk. The Styles section quickly became the subject of jokes—and Arthur's first conspicuous failure.

The biggest gaffe in the inaugural edition was the lead piece—a look at the “body part as fashion accessory.” It was illustrated by an oversized photograph of a woman's muscular bare arm and fist. Frankel, the executive editor, had chosen the picture instead of one for an alternative story about a backlash against the wearing of aids ribbons. “He wanted something up and frothy,” Adam Moss, a young editor who had been brought in to help launch Styles, recalled. “The idea was to ape a woman's magazine.” What neither Frankel nor the other senior editors realized was that the picture could be construed as referring to a marginal gay sex practice. At the seventieth-birthday party of the former managing editor Arthur Gelb, Abe Rosenthal cracked in a toast, “I knew we were in a new age when I saw the first edition of Styles of the Times. Not only did it give New York the finger, it gave it the whole arm.”

Soon, advertisers began to withdraw from the new section, and in June, 1994, Styles was quietly folded into the back of the Sunday Metro section. (A more restrained version has since been revived as a stand-alone section called Sunday Styles.)

Punch believed that his son had to learn by his mistakes, but his forbearance was severely tested when, in the spring of 1994, Arthur, without his father's knowledge, saw to it that the paper's new contract with the Newspaper Guild provided health insurance and other benefits for same-sex couples. The “domestic partners” provision fulfilled a promise that Arthur had made two years earlier to the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, but to Punch it came as a distasteful surprise. He learned of the ground-breaking change only when he read about it in the New York Observer. “He has a right to be pissed at me,” Arthur admitted. “I finagled it; I did an end run.” But he added, with a tone of moral certainty, “My father's position on [gay benefits] is wrong.”

While Arthur bobbed and weaved as a fledgling publisher, Primis began his own campaign for change on the business side. What the company needed was, as he put it, “professional management”—shorthand for no family interference. In this, he was influenced by Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., the chairman of I.B.M., who, as a Times director, was pushing hard at board meetings for “shareholder value”—the catchphrase for higher earnings, quarter after quarter. As the ownership of Times stock became more widely held, Primis believed, pension funds and other institutional investors would demand the sort of high returns that only a management uninfluenced by the traditions and constraints of family ownership could provide. “Take Punch out of the equation and put Lou Gerstner in charge of the company as the chairman of the board, what would really change at the New York Times?” he said to us when we raised the issue of who should succeed Punch as the company's chairman and C.E.O.

Had Primis achieved notable success as president, his case for professional management might have been more compelling, but he seemed to have no coherent vision for the company beyond what he had read in the latest books on management; his initiatives were scattered and out of keeping with the Times Company's fundamental nature. In 1994, and without informing the elder Sulzberger, Primis announced that the company intended to bid for Madison Square Garden—an idea Punch considered absurd. Primis then embarked on a plan to capitalize on the Times-owned magazine Golf Digest by building a series of driving ranges. Symbolically, Primis's biggest blunder was to build a showcase office for himself, just at the height of the company's belt-tightening period during the mid-nineties. The office, which was rumored to have cost a million dollars, was derided at the paper's headquarters, on West Forty-third Street, as “the Taj Mahal.” Primis seemed impervious to the criticism, pointing to the fact that his tough cost-cutting had caught Wall Street's attention, and that the company's stock price was ticking upward.

By the spring of 1996, Punch was in a state of dismay about Primis. In Punch's opinion, Primis had taken a shortsighted and narrowly profit-driven view of shareholder value. Moreover, Primis seemed to disdain the Sulzbergers' deeply held notion of themselves as stewards of the Times. From the very first, Primis had made it clear that he considered Arthur inadequate to fill his father's shoes. “We've got to keep Arthur at the newspaper,” he cautioned other executives in private. “We can't let him try to influence the direction of the company.” He had also put obstacles in the path of Michael Golden, whose recent promotion to vice-presidential status was hard-won. Indeed, in an attempt to persuade Punch that the company had grown beyond the Sulzbergers, Primis had repeatedly avoided discussing what management roles the family might play in the future. To Arthur, Primis's behavior was incomprehensible. “What was really hard was to see a guy I really liked and respected self-destruct—to watch it and know there was nothing I could do,” he said. “I walked into his office any number of times and tried to talk to him about this, but, from the very first, it was clear that he would not engage in that conversation.”

Primis's final insult was his absence from a gala dinner held that June at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to celebrate a hundred years of the family's ownership of the Times. Primis regarded the affair as purely a social bash, at which he wouldn't be missed, and he went to Paris to attend a board meeting of the International Herald Tribune and then to vacation with his wife and children. Three months later, in September, Primis was let go.

We happened to interview Primis in his palatial office on the afternoon before he was fired, and we found him in a confident mood. He was trimmer and calmer than when we had last seen him, and he had abandoned a nervous habit of bouncing on his feet. “I think we're defining the business better—we have a tighter strategy,” he said. The next day, after the board had acted, a sombre Punch came into Primis's office. “He was troubled and pained,” Primis later recalled. “I knew exactly what he was going to do when he walked in the door.” Punch was straightforward. He had got his mind around succession, he said, and he wanted a No. 2 who was harmonious with him, with his family, and with what they wanted to do in the future. Primis wasn't working out. He and the company would have to part—immediately. Primis maintained that he had never wanted any job other than the one he had—that he would be happy to remain president forever. Then he asked, “Is this a reversible situation?” Punch shook his head.

Since Arthur's childhood, his stepmother, Carol Sulzberger, had been a formidable adversary. An insecure woman with a strong combative streak, Carol had long resented the fact that the family felt continued affection for Punch's ex-wife, Barbara, and she seemed to take those feelings out on her stepson. His sudden appearance as an adolescent in her household in 1966 had created a difficult adjustment. “Carol was not used to having boys around,” Arthur's sister Karen said. “She grew up with a sister and had two girls of her own, and Arthur was a whole different creature for her. I think the problem does go all the way back to those years.”

To protect her own position of influence as Punch's wife, Carol had fought Arthur's appointment as publisher every step of the way. She scoffed when others suggested that he was the best-prepared member of his generation to take the job, and she denigrated the importance of any individual, including Arthur, who might hold the job. “If tomorrow there was a trained monkey at the head of the New York Times, that trained monkey would be the one invited to the White House,” she remarked. Carol considered her stepson a phony for taking public transportation everywhere and dining out in cheap ethnic restaurants, and she objected to the changes he was making at the paper. “So many people ask me, 'Why are there so many stories about gays? Why do the stories seem slanted toward blacks?' ” she said in 1995. When Punch made Arthur the publisher, it was in defiance of Carol, and she was not gracious in defeat. “Did you ever see the film 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' ” a friend who knew Punch and Carol well inquired. “That's what it was like—rough, rough, rough. They fought like cats and dogs.”

Carol's receiving a diagnosis of colon cancer in 1993 didn't soften her antipathy for Arthur. During a visit to the London bureau, she stuck out her tongue at the photograph of him that hung on the wall next to photographs of other Times publishers. When Arthur called her hospital room one day to ask whether he and Gail could come over, his half sister, Cynthia, picked up the phone and relayed the message to her mother. “I told you, I don't want visitors!” Carol yelled loud enough for her stepson to hear.

Carol died in August of 1995. During her memorial service, at Temple Emanu-El, Arthur gave a eulogy to his stepmother. Without glossing over her brutal candor, he expressed admiration for her “grit” and the immutability of her beliefs. “Carol was like a Martini,” Arthur said. “The first sip is a bit of a shock, but by the second and third you feel quite comfortable. And by the end of the first Martini you want another.” When Punch's daughters returned to the family pew after their speeches, Punch reached out and touched their hands. When Arthur came back to his seat, he kissed him.

In the next few months, Arthur and his father gradually became more intimate. “We just started talking one day, and found that we liked each other more than we had known,” Punch recalled. They began having regular lunches together and meetings. When, in 1996, Punch got remarried, to Allison Cowles, the sixty-one-year-old widow of the newspaper publisher William H. Cowles III, Arthur served as best man.

By the mid-nineties, Punch had made up his mind to transfer ultimate authority at the Times Company to his son. The problem was how to do so in a way that the family would regard as fair and Wall Street and the company's board of directors would perceive as responsible. Over two private dinners with his father, Arthur suggested that he remain publisher of the newspaper and take on the title of chairman. On October 16, 1997, the day that color photographs made their first appearance on the front page of the Times, the board of directors elected Arthur chairman of the company; Russ Lewis, the company president, was named C.E.O., reporting to the chairman; and Arthur's cousin Michael Golden was promoted to vice-chairman and senior vice-president—a move that satisfied the family's concerns about fairness. Punch himself assumed the title of chairman emeritus.

No succession at the Times arouses more speculation than that of the paper's next executive editor, whose job is to direct the news operation. Even though the incumbent, Joe Lelyveld, is still three years away from the mandatory retirement age of sixty-five, there is considerable talk about who will come after him. The two men whose names are most frequently mentioned for the job—Howell Raines and Bill Keller—are radically different in background and style.

Raines, who is fifty-six and has been the editorial-page editor since 1993, is a classic Southern liberal. At Birmingham-Southern College, an all-white institution, he took a degree in English in 1964. A year earlier, four young black girls were killed in a bombing by white supremacists in a church not far from the campus. More than thirty years later, Raines still regrets that he didn't join in the protests over the killings. “I was afraid,” he said. “I lived through this great confrontation and didn't participate fully, because I wasn't brave enough.”

Raines covered politics for the Atlanta Constitution and the St. Petersburg Times before he was hired, in 1978, as a reporter in the New York Times' Atlanta bureau. In 1981, he became the paper's White House correspondent, and after a stint in London he was appointed head of the Washington bureau. Raines, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for a Times Magazine article about his childhood friendship with his family's black housekeeper, sees himself as a man who has risen on his talents. In Washington, he earned a reputation as a demanding taskmaster, who created resentment by lavishing attention on a small lineup of stars.

A rugged-looking man who can strike people as intimidating, Raines is one of Arthur's closest advisers. An important reason that he agreed to take on the editorial page is that Arthur promised to invest the job with more power and visibility than it had had before. Arthur's vision of how he wanted to run the Times was by creating a Brain Trust, consisting of him, as publisher, and the executive editor, the general manager, and the editorial-page editor, with whom he would consult regularly. What the two men have most in common are their liberal beliefs and their essentially contrarian natures.

Keller grew up in San Mateo, California, as a son of the chairman and chief executive officer of Chevron. After graduating from Pomona College, he wrote for the Portland Oregonian and the Congressional Quarterly, and worked in the Washington bureau of the Dallas Times-Herald before joining the Times, in 1984, as a Pentagon correspondent. In 1986, the paper assigned him to Moscow, and there he won a Pulitzer Prize for chronicling the Soviet collapse. His most recent posts had been held by Lelyveld himself: those of foreign editor and of bureau chief in South Africa.

When Lelyveld tapped Keller to be his managing editor, in 1997, he caused resentment by promoting him over the paper's six assistant managing editors. At the time, Keller was ending a fifteen-year marriage, after becoming involved with a journalist, Emma Gilbey, who was pregnant with his child. In the old, more straitlaced days at the Times, such an incident would have probably damaged one's chances of advancement, and many of Keller's colleagues thought that Lelyveld, who is quiet and introverted, would take a dim view of the tangle. Keller, however, maintains that Lelyveld was “a good supporter and friend during that period.” Last April, when Keller married Gilbey, Lelyveld was his best man. At the reception, some were shocked to hear Keller address the rivalry between him and Raines, who was present. “Joe's a hard act to follow,” Keller told the crowd, in response to a toast that Lelyveld had just given. Then, after waiting a beat, he said, “But let's not talk about succession.”

Politically, Keller, who is both intensely competitive and irreverent, considers himself “left-leaning.” He says, however, that growing up with a father whom he regards as both an accomplished corporate executive and a man of conscience has made him “less knee-jerk about my view of business.”

Lelyveld is widely thought to favor his deputy, but he maintains that he has not indicated any preference to the publisher, or to anyone else. In 1994, when Lelyveld was casting about for his first managing editor, he sounded out Raines. A year later, Lelyveld told us, “Howell's not a great deputy type. I didn't want to get into a situation where I was going to become the managing editor of my managing editor.”

Next month, at Arthur's urging, Raines will spend several weeks taking an executive-management course at Dartmouth. When Lelyveld heard about that sabbatical, he sought—and got—assurances from Arthur that this did not indicate that a decision about the succession had been reached. The development has added a frisson of tension to relations between the executive editor and the editor of the editorial page. “We're a little like barons in a Shakespeare play,” Lelyveld said. “We're careful around each other.”

Arthur maintains that he isn't close to picking either man. “My father taught me never to make a decision before its time,” he said. “And, as far as I know, Joe plans to be here for a long time to come.” Even so, the smart money is on Raines, because, as a member of the publisher's inner circle, he is aware of the issues that Arthur cares about. Keller, on the other hand, is still getting to know Arthur. “I can count on the fingers of two hands the number of times we've spoken alone,” Keller said. “We're still kind of taking the measure of each other.” In the newsroom, there is apocalyptic talk that a Raines regime will result in a “purge” and a “bloodbath” for all but a few stars. Raines maintains that he has learned to be a more patient, gentle, and inclusive manager, and he says he appreciates the need for both traditional reporters and literary stylists. “The six most talented people [in the newsroom] can't put out a newspaper,” he says. “But the New York Times also needs the marquee value of stars to prevail.”

If Arthur does, in fact, decide on Raines, he could preserve the option to appoint the younger Keller after Raines retires. The question is how Keller will react if he loses out this time around. Theoretically, he could switch places with Raines and become editor of the editorial page, but colleagues say that that job doesn't interest him. When he was the foreign editor, he often joked that he had started up a Times bureau in one of his favorite cities, Istanbul, so that he would have a place to escape to should the occasion arise. “If it comes to it,” he says, “I could imagine being a reporter again.”

For Arthur, a more critical issue for the future is what the Times Company should do about the medium that Bill Gates has said marks the beginning of the end of newspapers as we know them. Arthur now spends roughly half his time on issues having to do with the Internet. “We are in a business that is being transformed by a communications revolution that is altering our basic sense of time and space,” he told his employees earlier this year, in his annual State of the Times speech. “I suspect we will look back at what we [have] accomplished [in the past] . . . and remember it as being easy.”

Like every other major newspaper in the country, the Times has a Web site, as do most of its magazines and broadcast properties. But that may not be enough to keep the Times competitive in today's rapidly transforming markets. Nearly every day, media conglomerates are forging electronic partnerships and spinning off Internet companies. The New York Times Company is not A.T. & T. or Disney; it doesn't have the resources to become an on-line leviathan, as its recent, comparatively timid, seven-and-a-half-per-cent investment in the financial-information site TheStreet.com attests. Moreover, the company's flagship entity, the Times newspaper, is what is called, in the withering jargon of Wall Street, a “mature” product—meaning that improvement and expansion will likely occur on the margins, if at all.

Last April, with Arthur's concurrence, the C.E.O., Russ Lewis, asked several of his senior executives to develop a plan to consolidate the company's electronic operations into a separate corporate entity. The idea was to sell a portion of the new company's shares to the public in order to generate cash to buy interests in other Internet enterprises or to acquire the software and personnel needed to establish the Times Company as an Internet player. In the argot of the Net, the Times wanted to create “Internet currency.”

Some executives at the paper worried that Lewis was rushing a decision that had the potential to put the new digital enterprise, rather than the Times itself, at the center of the company. “There might be something out there called the New York Times, and it might be very profitable,” Lelyveld said, “but, at least notionally, the newsroom could be in a very weak position.”

In early May, all the participants gathered at the Times Building to discuss how to proceed. When Goldman, Sachs, the company's investment bankers, pronounced the spinoff not yet ready to be brought to market, the editors were relieved but not mollified. “What if the bankers had gone the other way?” they asked themselves. “What then?” One editor said, “The whole experience left everybody feeling a little queasy.”

A few weeks later, the company merged all its Internet properties into a single division, called Times Company Digital—a tentative step in the direction of a spinoff. Last week, the company's vision of its electronic future became clearer when it agreed to acquire Abuzz Technologies, a specialty software company. According to Arthur, Abuzz software will allow the Times to connect its high-demographic users to one another with a heightened level of communications.

But how, precisely, the traditional values and standards of the Times are to be maintained in the anarchic world of the Internet remains an open question that lies, ultimately, in Arthur's hands. “My interest, finally, is that we do nothing to dilute the journalism of the New York Times,” Lelyveld says. “We all depend on Arthur to interpret the different sides around the table.”

Already, journalists at the paper complain of feeling like second-class citizens. Several of them grumble that Arthur's State of the Times speech overemphasized the Internet. “The folks at the newspaper were saying, 'What are we? Chopped liver? It's all digital, digital, digital,' ” one editor said. In the newsroom, editors and reporters are already expressing anxiety over whether they will get a fair share of the Internet bounty.

Publicly, Arthur predicts that getting more involved with the Internet is going to be a “wet kiss” for the Times, because it stands to make the paper and the company's other news products instantaneously global. Privately, however, he has had his share of misgivings. Last February, when he came home from a digital-strategy seminar, in Tarrytown, New York, where the spinoff idea first took shape, his wife, Gail, asked him how it went. “Great,” he said sarcastically, “if you don't mind the message that you can either cannibalize your company or let someone else do it for you.”

Twenty-one months after Arthur became chairman, the burden of his responsibilities has begun to show. “His natural lightheartedness is on hold for a while,” Gail says. “I look forward to the time when it will come back.”

Occasionally, the playful wise guy still surfaces. Last October, Arthur arrived at a Halloween party dressed as Senator Putzhead—a reference to the Republican Senator Alfonse D'Amato, who had been ridiculed for using the word to describe a political rival. Arthur's hastily assembled costume consisted of white tie and tails, and a Groucho mask with outsized glasses, bushy eyebrows, and a large penis nose—a mask that he had admired for years on his cousin Dan Cohen and borrowed for the occasion. (A few weeks after the party, Arthur decided that Cohen should step down from his job as senior vice-president of advertising at the Times. Removing him was, he said, the most difficult personal experience of his career, but his cousin has rebounded by starting a production company for TV and Internet programming based on Times material, and the two men maintain that their friendship is stronger than ever.)

When Arthur was the heir apparent, he showed his anxiety mainly by grinding his teeth at night. These days, his hair has a touch of gray, and in order to have his favorite Belvedere Vodka Martini at night (straight up, with olives, and heavy on the vermouth), he has substituted oatmeal with brown sugar and raisins for his morning corn muffin. Recently, Gail has detected new symptoms of stress: the only time she sees his shoulders in their normal position is when they get into their Lexus and head for their country house in New Paltz. “He knows how fragile it is, he knows how remarkable it is,” she says, referring to the paper. “It's daunting. I don't think anyone quite appreciates how hard it is.”

Arthur likes to joke that he and other members of his generation in the family grew up with tape recorders under their pillows chanting, “You are one with the paper. You are one with the Times.” On a credenza behind his office chair is a three-sided handmade nameplate, created for him last year at a company budget meeting. On one side is inscribed “Publisher.” The second side has “Chairman” on it. And on the third side—the one that is visible to visitors—are the words “Defender of the Faith.” ♦